HAS EXTREME BORDER VIOLENCE LEFT PEOPLE NUMB?

A couple of weeks ago, we pondered on how hard it is to fathom the
human toll in a disaster such as Haiti's earthquake. This weekend
there was another tragedy down on the border that's just the latest
nightmare in the disaster that is Mexico's drug war.

In Ciudad Juarez, just across from El Paso, Texas, gunmen blocked off
a dead-end street and went on a rampage through three houses,
including one where there was a birthday party in progress. When the
shooting stopped, 10 people were dead, and six more died later at
hospitals, according to The Associated Press.

Eleven of the 16 people were teenagers, the youngest, 13-year-old
Yomira Aurora Delgado Lara, reported the El Paso Times. As of Tuesday,
12 other shooting victims remained hospitalized, four of them in
critical condition.

In the El Paso newspaper, the teenagers were described as good kids
who were community-minded, collected clothing and canned goods for
charit and "were good students and dedicated athletes."

Now they're statistics, more numbers added to a perpetually climbing
death rate that now totals more than 4,400 people in Juarez since
January 2008 when two cartels went to war, according to the El Paso
Times. To put that in perspective, that's roughly about a third of
Mountain Home's population murdered in two years.

Can you imagine 4,400 murdered in just a single location in a two-year
period?

Since President Felipe Calderon launched his offensive against drug
cartels in 2006, according to AP, more than 15,000 people have been
killed. This is bloodletting on a massive scale. Mexico's drug war
between the government and the embattled drug gangs has gotten so out
of hand that the death toll is simply mind numbing.

We see the agony in Haiti, we can see the destruction and death there,
but can't we see the massive tragedy happening on our own doorstep? Or
is it too much for Americans to accept or comprehend? Are we truly
concerned about firefights and massacres just across our border that
are more similar to what happens in Afghanistan than they are the
1920s gang wars to which events in Mexico have been compared? Not even
the worst mobster committed atrocities on this level.

Such incidents have become so commonplace that a political science
professor at the University of Texas at El Paso called Saturday's
killing "considerably more shocking, in my view, from other
massacres." The El Paso paper noted there have been mass shootings at
drug rehabilitation centers, restaurants and nightclubs.

One mass shooting took place in November outside an elementary school
in Juarez where four men were lined up and executed. One of those men
was from El Paso, and authorities said since two of the school
shooting victims lived in the same neighborhood as the birthday party
massacre, they may have been connected.

We've commented on the violence along the border before, and sadly
there seems to be little America can do to help stop it, other than
stopping the flow of guns south of the border, the smuggling of drugs
north of the border and the exchange of cash in both directions.

The sad fact is that, as it always has, Americans' taste for illicit
drugs fuels death and tragedy in other countries with little concern
about what happens there. Whoever thought drug use was a victimless
crime ought to talk to the families of those teenagers, the victims of
out-of-control drug violence.

Nothing short of a cultural overhaul is going to slow or stop
Americans' fascination and dependency on illegal drugs. When it comes
to the border bloodbath, the best America seems capable of doing now
is trying to keep the levee intact so the floodwaters of drugs and
violence don't wash over onto our side of the border.

Unfortunately, the best Mexico seems able to do is keep up with the
body count as people continue being killed daily, many -- if not most --
of them innocents caught in the crossfire. Two days after the birthday
party, according to AP, five people were gunned down in a Juarez bar.

We can't seem to get our minds around the magnitude of a natural
disaster that's beyond our control as people. Has that same inability
to comprehend death of such enormity in the border drug wars left us
so numb that they're almost beyond human control, too?